The "root" user account on Linux has full administrative privileges over the entire system. If you want to edit system configuration files, install software, add users, or virtually anything else outside of your home directory, you'll need root access. For most tasks, you won't need to log or switch to the root user account—you can run your administrative tasks with the sudo command to run them as root. This prevents you from doing damage while logged in with full superuser permissions. If you're using Ubuntu, the root account is locked by default to prevent this from happening. But if you need to keep root access while doing a large amount of system tasks, you can enable the root user and become root with the su command, or by signing in as root on console. This wikiHow teaches you how to enable the Linux root user and gain root access.
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